A Project Management Dichotomy

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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If you’ve heard me speak in person this year or attended one of my webinars, there is a fairly good chance that you have heard me reference a Gartner paper that was published at the end of December 2013. It was one of its “Gartner Predicts” pieces, and it was entitled “PPM leaders must prepare for extreme transformation, or prepare new résumés”. The theme of the paper is that portfolio management is going to become more important to organizations as business transformation becomes more commonplace (thanks to technology, global competition, etc.). The Gartner argument is if portfolio managers and/or PMOs don’t step up and embrace that change, then they will lose the opportunity.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but it’s another element of the paper that I want to focus on here--the idea that in the future, there will be two type of project managers--the business PM and the “keep the lights on” PM. Those different PMs will have different skill sets and will perform different functions for the organization--a value-add business leader on the one hand, and a specialist subject matter expert function on the other.

I’ll let you find and read the Gartner report for all of the details, but in this paper I want to look at how those different “arms” of project management are going to …

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